April 15, 1973

At the Very Least, an Inspired Kind of Typing

By JOHN DECK

KEROUAC
A Biography. By Ann Charters.

ruman Capote said it wasn't writing but "typing" in 1959, when Jack Kerouac's books were
crowding the market. Among the novels on the stands then was "The Dharma Bums," written in
"ten sittings" and labeled a "potboiler" by the author himself. In that novel were visions and
prophecies of the famous "rucksack revolution," land-loving congregations of holy people taking to
the hills, and the adaptation of Eastern philosophy in the unenlightened West. Much of what was
foreseen is today. Surely people who still hold with Mr. Capote's statement would admit that it
was, at the very least, inspired typing.

Usually a recognized literary movement can be expected to influence subsequent writing. Feasibly
it changes attitudes and affects language. But the Beat Generation did much more. Sons of the
middle classes left home after reading "On the Road." Those commonplaces of our era--drugs,
youth cult, ecstasy questing, rapping and the call for radical surgery on the Great American Oaf--
surfaced and took hold with, and probably because of, Beat writing.

The obscenity trial of Allen Ginsberg's "Howl" and Kerouac's term on best-seller lists probably
spelled the doom of underground literature. Everything came up on the counters after that. Poetry
escaped its long confinement in faculty lounges. Different audiences assembled, expecting writing
that suited their age, tastes and degree of affiliation with the society.

In view of what has happened since, Ann Charters's "Kerouac: A Biography" seems a modest
appraisal. She doesn't dwell at length on his influence. It's there.

It is the nature of this subgenre to scale down literary giants. You can almost summarize the result:
In the late fifties and sixties there occurred in the United States a stocky literary phenomenon of
medium height who drank too much, talked a lot, traveled widely with an assortment of seers and
doers, wrote about his friends and travels at Mom's kitchen table and may have outlived his genius
though he died a comparatively young man. Kerouac emerges from his biography with the
obsessions, contradictory impulses and energy of those unheroic protagonists of conventional
novels. Since he spent most of his life as a writer making his legend and making it known, he
probably would resent the "demythifying" were he here to read it.

And "Kerouac" sticks to the form, except for the inclusion of an astrological reading (prepared by
Carolyn Cassady) in the appendices. It begins chronologically and calmly with the French
Canadian family in Lowell, Mass., covers the death of his brother Gerard, the small towns and
athletics that led to his college scholarship. He was writing before he went to Columbia, but
meeting William Burroughs and Allen Ginsberg opened him up to art, just as the timely arrival of
his friend Neal Cassady (who also figures prominently in Tom Wolfe's "The Electric Kool-Aid
Acid Test") opened him up to the country. All the trips, the people, the reading and talk which
appear in Kerouac's books, with only a few of the names changed, are accounted for.

Ann Charters places in some doubt the "spontaneous prose" which he claimed as his patent. She
points out that he retyped if he did not revise. Kerouac is quoted in a letter to Allen Ginsberg as
feeling he was "originating (without knowing it, you say?) a new way of writing about life, no
fiction, no craft, no revising." But he read and appreciated Whitman, Henry Miller, CÚline and
Joyce, and there is no denying similarities. In 1951, when he was having trouble finding his voice,
he received a long letter from Neal Cassady, a part of Cassady's unfinished autobiography. It was
important to him: "Neal's autobiographical style was exactly what Kerouac had been fumbling
toward himself in his grandiose plans to be a writer."

Nothing is really disturbed by such disclosures. Until publishers decide to print photographs of
drafts snatched hot from the typewriter, the whole concern with how something is written can be of
interest only to people who hope to find magic in mechanics.

Ann Charters does not disguise her sympathies, and she concentrates on the life rather than the
letters. She states her preferences among his works, and they do not always jibe with Kerouac's
choices. But she has little to say that is negative about any of the books, and it would be possible, I
think, to infer from this that he was what no other writer has ever been--consistent throughout his
career. He simply wasn't.

Among his later novels, "Satori in Paris" and "Big Sur" are cited here as reports of his personal
decline. I read them both for the first time recently and felt that despite its title, "Satori in Paris" is
at best a detail, and not a particularly significant one; while "Big Sur" is of major importance in
Kerouac's "Dulouz legend." There were distinguishable differences in scope, tone, and, yes, merit
in Kerouac's first novels as well. I consider myself an admirer of Kerouac but nothing will ever
convince me that "The Subterraneans," with that giddily pretentious first paragraph to kick it off,
comes up to either "On the Road" or "The Dharma Bums."

None of these reservations are going to hurt this biography. Dissertation grist abounds. An
example would be a study of the very real Neal Cassady and the mythified Gerard, with Jack in the
middle. He seemed to search for, and find, substitute brothers throughout most of his life. He
brought them home in memory and wrote about them. But his mother barred the door or limited
the visit if they threatened to appear in person.

There are enigmas. Neal Cassady threatens to become a sort of biped Moby Dick in modern
American literature--fiction and nonfiction. And there is no reasonable explanation for the
convergence of Allen Ginsberg, William Burroughs, Gary Snyder and the rest. Assembled in
Kerouac's company once more, they still generate energy that comes right up out of the pages.

Kerouac's late-blooming conservatism is given short shrift, as it should be. He was a battered man
when he shocked followers with his pronouncements. In a way it is to his credit that he could
shock people. Among his friends were a number of anarchists, and in his books he reported their
attitudes without hedging or horror. He helped publicize their positions. The artist-reporter quite
capably subdued the all-American residing in him until very late in his career.

Ann Charters's "Kerouac," taken as straight biography or as an evocation of perhaps one of the
liveliest periods in American letters, is a pleasure. It is about men and ideas that changed
everything. That's reason enough to read it.

John Deck is the author of "Greased Samba," a collection of short stories. His most recent book is
"Rancho Paradise."